NGP VAN is excited to announce the release of a beta-version Voter Registration Data Visualization tool to our administrative users. Two of our developer leads, Greg Shapiro and Joe Tochka, found an interesting data movement visualization tool on the New York Times website, and thought they could use something like it to give people better insight into how an voter registration applicant moves to become a registered voter. They worked together during our hackathon earlier this year to produce a prototype, and we’re excited to see this ready in time to impact users’ voter registration programs this year!

Turf Cutter, one of VAN’s most popular and important organizing tools has just become more intuitive and user-friendly with a few innovative enhancements that will help organizers do their jobs even better than before.

NGP VAN had a Hackathon earlier in the year for our development teams. My fellow developers and I had the latitude to work on anything we wanted, and my first inclination was to work on political contributions using Bitcoin. I wanted to work on Bitcoin because (a) it's something a lot of developers, organizations, and companies have been talking about but no one has done yet, and (b) I'm very interested in digital currencies. As my coworkers will attest, I've been excited about Bitcoin since before pretty much anyone else had even heard about it.

Ready for Hillary’s Digital Director, Nickie Titus discussed the work we’ve been doing far out from 2016 saying, "NGP VAN sees the broader picture. They see how technology affects the long term."

Nickie Titus praised our developers’ work (they are indeed pretty awesome) on tools such as NGP Swipe and Social Organizing. But the really big splash came in her preview of our newest tool, Social Recruiting, which incentives supporters to recruit friends, family, and online social connections to participate in the grassroots organizing efforts of a particular campaign of organization

It's very exciting and gratifying to see my NGP VAN hackathon project, the OpenVPB.com site, finally launched and in use! Having made my fair share of phone calls over the past decade or so, in elections up and down the ballot, I know the importance of phone banks at every stage of a field operation. Organizers ask their volunteers to make calls to identify supportive voters, recruit supporters to events, and of course, to get out the vote on election day. Phone banks are as much a part of our electoral process as Labor Day parades and yard signs.